The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

The Compression of Thin Bonded Blocks of Soft Elastic Material

Papoulia, Katerina D.; Kelly, James M.

UCB/SEMM-1987/12, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1987, 30 pages (500/C23/87/12)

The problem of a block of compressible soft elastic material, bonded on its top and bottom parallel faces to rigid end plates, against which any slip is prevented, and subjected to direct compression, is examined. Solutions are obtained using the minimum potential energy variational principle. The effective compression stiffness of the block is of particular interest. Results are compared with those obtained based on the assumption of a pressure distribution within the block. Excellent agreement is found in the case of thin blocks, having a width-to-thickness ratio greater than or equal to 5. The assumptions of the "pressure" theory are also shown to be justified for thin blocks, by an order of magnitude analysis. With these, the "pressure" theory is then formally extracted from the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-87-12.pdf (1 MB)